Scripting for Increased Accessibility

[CaplinCaplin]

Hi All,

I'm a newbie to the X series, and trying to get a handle on how best I can play these games as someone who is totally blind. It occurs to me that I might be able to script a few tools to help with areas which are difficult for me, such as manual trading.

The screen reader has reasonable OCR functionality, which I use regularly, but I was wondering what sorts of things I might be able to do with scripts? (I've obtained a copy of the XStudio, which seems like it will be more accessible than the built-in editor.)

Are scripts able to, say, call external programs? I might be able to use one to feed some information to my speech synthesizer, rather than depending exclusively on the game's computer voice.

I'm trying to avoid disturbing the core game play experience as much as I can. My goal is a "quality of life," improvement for the blind, so to speak. I believe this game has a great deal of potential for accessibility and enjoyment already, if I can overcome a few hurdles.

Thanks for any thoughts.

[X2-Illuminatus]

Are scripts able to, say, call external programs? I might be able to use one to feed some information to my speech synthesizer, rather than depending exclusively on the game's computer voice.

No, scripts cannot call external programs. The only thing you can do with scripts is writing text to an external logfile and reading in text from a textfile.

[CaplinCaplin]

Thanks for the answer. That means I'll probably have to come up with a different solution to the problem of reading things that my OCR chokes on. I'm 98% sure I can. At the moment, trade prices are the most annoying, though I'm sure other stuff will present itself as I get deeper into the game.

[vukica]

There used to be a dev chat application that worked inside the game. I don't remember if it took input, or if it was just output.

Link: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=286739
I'm not sure if links over there work at all.

[CaplinCaplin]

Would you say it's worth getting onto the devchat for scripting questions? I'd just love to go where ever the most knowledge can be found. I feel like I'm floundering a bit in a sea of tutorials and such of uncertain provenance. I want to make this game more accessible for me, and believe I'm ~95% there, but just not sure how.

[vukica]

Would you say it's worth getting onto the devchat for scripting questions? I'd just love to go where ever the most knowledge can be found. I feel like I'm floundering a bit in a sea of tutorials and such of uncertain provenance. I want to make this game more accessible for me, and believe I'm ~95% there, but just not sure how.

No, I'm saying that the devchat app is an example of how an external app can be connected to the game. I'm not sure anyone is still using the chat itself.

[Cycrow]

The only way to get data to external software is to do what X2-Illuminatus suggests. Write out the data to a log file using a script. Then get an external program to read in that log file, that can then call another program if needed.
Getting data back into the game is a little trickier, and relies on creating a t file, and getting a script to read it in